Authors. Feh.

[cnoocy]

Apparently Ray Bradbury has been saying that Fahrenheit 451 is not a book about censorship, but one about television. And everyone is up in arms about it trying to prove that he once said different.

Can I just say it doesn't matter? If there was ever a clear piece of evidence that the author is not the ultimate authority on a work, it's right here. Stop paying attention to Bradbury and talk about the book. Talk about the book as an anti-censorship work. Don't rebut Bradbury in terms of his brain. It's kind of his turf, so it's not going to go well for you.

I notice that a lot of the people commenting on this are themselves authors, so maybe they have trouble letting go of their own, um, authority. If you're an author, learn to be one of many readers of the book you've written. Find and read Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's "Pharaoh's Daughter" because she's an author who gets it.

Comments

[mildmannered.livejournal.com]

There is a wonderful story in Dandelion Wine about a woman giving up the people she was in the past, realizing that those people don't exist anymore, and that the only real person is the old woman she is now. She throws out all the stuff she's collected - ticket stubs, playbills - and gives her other possessions to the children who insist that she was never young.

Bradbury is no longer the man who wrote Fahrenheit 451 or Dandelion Wine or the Martian Chronicles, a fact made clear by his really terrible reworking of his Family stories into a book length travesty a few years ago. That person is gone. It's too bad he doesn't know it.

[cnoocy]

Interesting! If we can't hold on to ourselves, how can we hold on to our works?

[(Anonymous)]

I met Ray Bradbury at a book signing, and I was so utterly in awe of him that I could barely manage to give him my name so he could sign the book to me. (I still have the book.)

Then I saw his appearance on "Politically Incorrect" in which he shrugged off Bob Packwood having sexually assaulted his secretary with a kind of "well that's the way guys treat girls, so what?", and even Bill Maher was like, um, you don't mean that, do you? There's been no doubt in my mind for years now that reconciling Bradbury the author and Bradbury the man (possibly just Bradbury the elderly man) is like trying to reconcile Jane Fonda the political activist and Barbarella.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

(Curses. That anonymous comment just now was me.)

[thedan.livejournal.com]

When Adam made his director's proposal for One Down, he pointed out several themes in the play which I didn't intend but are pretty clearly there. Not that I'm anywhere near as talented as Ray Bradbury, but I think some ideas weasel their way in without the author noticing.

[cnoocy]

It's not a matter of talent, I think. (Not that you're not a talented writer.) It's just a fundamental property of a text.

[colorwheel.livejournal.com]

as a professional book critic, i ignore author intent.

sometimes there is TEXT intent -- a book can set out an intent (and then accomplish it or not). but that's different.

Doing my part

[prog.livejournal.com]

Just today, in fact, I changed the section header of the novel's Wikipedia article from "Critical misinterpretation" to "Critical interpretation vs. authorial intent". (I think it is notable, in the WP sense, that the author throws so much pushback in the face of his own readers, so the section itself can stay.)

And it was y'all who taught me the difference in the LJ-ified annals, I'm pretty sure. :)

Re: Doing my part

[cnoocy]

Thank you!

Re: Doing my part

[jadelennox]

I love you sometimes.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I think it matters, in that you can't say "Fahrenheit 451 was written about censorship". (Assuming what he says now is true-- there may be enough evidence to suggest that he's either lying or forgetful.) But you can still use Fahrenheit 451 to make a point about censorship.

When people talk about ignoring authorial intent, it makes me think of Reagan using "Born in the USA" as a campaign song. What is the difference? Is it just that Springsteen's interpretation of his song is shared by most of his fans, while Bradbury's is probably not? (This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely confused.)

[cnoocy]

In terms of your first point, I think it's never safe to say "X was written about Y" except in the case of "Martial XI:19 was written about 5:00 on a Wednesday afternoon." Saying "X is about Y" is or "X deals with Y" is both safer and stronger.

In terms of your question, the difference is that Reagan's interpretation of the song is only supported at all by the chorus, so the text itself can be shown to fit Springsteen's stated interpretation better than Reagan's. (or Atwater's, or whoever.) Bradbury's interpretation of the book as an anti-television work is, in my opinion, not as well supported as an interpretation as an anti-censorship book.

[jadelennox]

Right. It's not that Reagan's interpretation violates Springsteen's intent, it's that it violates what CW above calls the *text's* intent. It's a misreading.

[jadelennox]

But to that extent, you can *never* say "Book X was written about Y". You can only say "The author of Book X says it was written about Y" or "Many critics interpret Book X to be about Y."

The problem with authorial intent is that you have:
1. What the author intended when he or she wrote the book
2. What the author remembers as having intended
3. What the author decides to tell people he or she intended
4. The book as it exists, regardless of (1)

Since I don't care about (1), and (2) and (3) make intent completely unknowable with any accuracy, we might as well focus on (4). (4) doesn't exist in a vacuum (there's the cultural and historical context in which the reader lives and reads, and which the reader believes the book was written and published in, and all other kinds of sociocultural and material contexts), but it's *knowable* in a way intent just *isn't*.

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

from the inside out, i would like to point out that there's usually other people, like an editor involved somewhere. ideally, an editor will be invisible, but her changes can alter all of the above nonetheless. even that definitive work of completely unknowable intent on all sides known as the holy bible had editors.*

lots of unchecked uncheckable factors go into a thing. the author is the last person i would listen to.

*understood there are exceptions. i can pinpoint where Harry Potter looses any sort of additional input, somewheres in book 4. my theory is that once they realized they would make money with no additional effort, they stopped additionally efforting. the results are disaster.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, the first time I really noticed this was with Spider Robinson. I used to really like him (but then, I used to really like Heinlein, too), though with his Callahan's stories, I kind of felt he was starting to slip a little, and Callahan's Lady was a little much. Then he had a series of new Callahan's stories in Asimov's (I think), which I read--they were at the library, which was right across the street from my apartment at the time--and I thought, "Wow, hey, these are pretty good. Maybe he's back." When they were collected and expanded into a book, I got the book from the library, and there was this really, really clear point at which the collected stories, which had gone through the editor of Asimov's, stopped, and Robinson's freeform "I'll just write whatever the hell I want" started.

Sorry, that anecdote had no point. I just felt like telling it.

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

right. we see this in movies as well, like Peter Jackson's "King Kong." sure, LoTR worked, but that doesn't mean the man should go unchecked.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I agree that there's no way to know for sure what the author intended, but I still think it's an interesting thing to speculate about, and these speculations factor into the way I think about a text. I guess you could say that what the author says about a text is another text in itself, and that should be approached separately. But I think the slogan "authorial intent doesn't matter" is either misleading, or I'm just still confused.

[cnoocy]

The thing is, there's both too little and too much information about an author's intent to be able to really discuss it. Too little because there's never enough real evidence about someone's state of mind, too much because what there is isn't necessarily reliable. So "authorial intent doesn't matter" is a shorthand way of saying "discussions of the author's state of mind are not as likely to bear interesting critical fruit as discussions of the text itself." In terms of what the author says, it certainly makes sense to discuss the author's interpretation, but it is still best to argue for or against that interpretation based on evidence within the text.

[prog.livejournal.com]

IOW, consider the author a reader who happens to be intimately familiar with the work. Their opinion has great weight, but it does not objectively trump any other interpretation of the work.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Heck, I have fun speculating on what an author might have been thinking. (Often in the sense of "for christ's sake, man, what were you thinking? you call this a plot?") And sometimes an author's statements can give me a new insight into a text--when I heard Brust talk about his political beliefs and how they influenced Teckla, I looked at it and thought, "Oh, that gives me a new perspective on the text."

But the key is still the text. If George Lucas comes forth and says, "In fact, Star Wars isn't a Campbellian/Jungian journey, it's a metaphor for the gold standard," believe me, I'll quite happily ignore him.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

But it's so obvious! C3PO's trials and tribulations - he even gets sort of melted down a few times! (OK, I'll stop.)

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

He never said anything about prunes, either.

[tablesaw]

I'm siding with Bradbury here.

I just got back from vacation, so I ahve no idea what "everyone" is saying. But it sounds to me like Bradbury is talking abot the germ of the book and the backstory of the book's present. It's easy to find parallels between Fahrenheit and 1984, but Bradbury seems to suggest that the situation in Fahrenheit is more a result of the citizens than of the state. The end result, the censorship state is the same, but the causes are very different. And it's easy to argue that the erosion of the quest for wisdom is more of a threat in modern America than the pointed establishment of a totalitarian state.